"Hey-yo hey! Pull the logs! Hey-yo hey! Pull the logs!"
"Bring them ashore! Bring them ashore! Get the able-bodied men over here! Haul this batch of fifty great logs onto land!"
"Idiots! These are thirty-meter great mountain timbers, solid mahogany and cypress! Call up squads of fifty! Fifty men to pull one log!"
"Yes! May the Main God bless us—I'll call the men over at once! Lay down the rolling logs and branches first..."
The Southern Shipbuilding Institute by the lakeside was a scene of utter bustle. Hundreds upon thousands of tribal able-bodied men moved like hardworking "worker ants," transporting all kinds of raw materials needed for shipbuilding. Timber a dozen meters tall was felled nearby, then dragged in by logging crews in small boats along rivers and lakes, delivered into large semi-subterranean kilns to be slowly dried. As for the charcoal used for drying, it was burned on-site in the nearby logging camps and charcoal yards. Beneath the unbroken black smoke rising from those mountain forests were charcoal yards, each with a workforce of a hundred men.
As for older, longer, thicker timbers more than twenty meters in length, they had to be fetched deep in the Tecos mountains, requisitioned from the local tribes as tribute. These great logs usually floated down from the upper reaches of the Talsas River system, from mountain streams more than a hundred li away. Then the Kingdom Water Fleet's great dugouts and sand ships towed them over the long distance to the Great Lake of Atoyac, until they finally reached the shipyard by the lake. And the warriors of the Institute of Divine Inspiration responsible for requisitioning these timbers were like "soldier ants" dispatched everywhere from an "ant nest," mobilizing more tribal "worker ants" over an even wider area to provide more manpower